Part of the mandate for the PHP Center for Expertise inside of Ibuildings is an ongoing series of Business Process Re-Engineering projects. The first of these projects, "Estimating Best Practices", was recently completed and released. It contains the collected best practices from estimators inside Ibuildings, as well as input from external experts and published works.

Our estimating team spent two months thinking and discussing how software companies create estimates; we discussed what works and what doesn't. While the final document itself, along with the accompanying workbook, are available internally only, some of what was learned about the meta process of estimating may be interesting to others. Here are four Best Practices that came out of the process that we want to share with everyone.